Taxi

"Midday. I've gone for croissants and married the baker in despair."

Notes on 'the Auteur'

When people discredit the "auteur" theory, it always seems to be based on an assumption that it implies a director is the only person responsible for the making of a film. This is obviously not true. As we're often told, film is a collaborative medium. And yet, even the most democratic of creative endeavors still has someone leading the project, acting as the funnel through which ideas are channeled, shaping the work from the ground up. Admittedly, having read very little critical theory, my conception of the auteur theory never seemed inherently specific to the role of the director. Yes, many directors are, or at the very least will be seen as "auteur" filmmakers, especially those that also write or conceive their own work. However, this isn't to say that the director is always the auteur.

For me, when we claim a film is the work of an "auteur", we're really saying, in the most plain and mundane terms, that it has an author. That despite the countless number of individual crew members, performers, producers, and financiers that may have contributed to the making of a film, that there was someone at the center of things, shepherding the project through to completion. This "auteur" could be the director, the writer, the producer and even the lead actor.

Think of the films of action stars like Tom Cruise, Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme, among others. They may work with directors that have a reputation for being "auteur" filmmakers, but there is nonetheless a consistency to the kind of subject matter these performers return to, an autonomy to how they're filmed and presented, a level of control over how the material is shaped and distributed, all of which go beyond the familiarities of their directors' prior or subsequent works. These actors are the authors of their respective films, their image and, to a large extent, their own legacies.

By contrast, in the modern Hollywood, the author of the work is often the studio and its army of executives. In the films of Disney®, including works by Pixar and Marvel Studios, the role of the writer, producer and director is to facilitate the creative wishes of the studio executives. They're not creating their own personal vision; they're creating a product that the studio has the power to approve or decline. In television, the series creator, or showrunner, is generally the "auteur." For instance, everyone recognizes a Ryan Murphey production when they see one – from Nip/Tuck (2003-2010) and American Horror Story (2011-present) to the more recent Netflix distributed Hollywood (2020), they have a consistent style, politics and casting – regardless of who writes or directs the individual episodes.

A good example of what I'm getting at here can be found in the film in question. Taxi (1998), a knockabout French action movie with aspirations to Hollywood, is directed (and directed well) by the veteran film and commercials director Gérard Pirès. Pirès's work on the film cannot be discredited. While Taxi isn't a great film, it is nonetheless well-acted, the story, thin as it is, remains frequently engaging, and the action sequences, particularly the way the numerous car chases have been filmed and edited, are never less than thrilling. But Pirès's isn't the author of the film, but rather fulfilling the vision of his writer and producer, Luc Besson.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

From the ground-up, Taxi is characteristic of Besson's own work as director, specifically his earlier films, such as Subway (1985) and La Femme Nikita (1990), and it sets the tone and template for many of the subsequent action movies the author would go on to write and produce, including The Transporter (2002), District 13 (2004) and Taken (2008), as well as those films' later sequels. In each of these works, Besson takes typically French characters, humor and settings, and juxtaposes them with very American themes, genres and storytelling devices, and the same is true for the film in question. Taxi is one-part "cinéma du look", one-part Hollywood buddy movie (à la 48 Hours [1982]), and one-part precursor to the "Fast & Furious" franchise.

Like Subway, the film begins with a burst of action. A vehicle speeding through the daytime streets, piloted by our central character. The camera, almost at ground-level, trails behind the vehicle, with loud music used to set the tone for action and excitement.

Subway [Luc Besson, 1985]:

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

In both films, the opening chase sequence is used to establish character and setting. Subway shows off the familiar Parisian settings recognisable from countless films before and since, while Taxi showcases the less familiar, though more exotic highways and byways of suburban Marseilles. However, these opening sequences, or title sequences even, also provide a more important function in expanding but also subverting the expectations of the viewing audience and our perception of the contemporary French cinema.

For a populist like Besson, the intention with films like Subway and Taxi, as well as later films like the aforementioned District 13, is to recreate the idea of the "French film™." To break apart the loftier or more highbrow expectations that audiences outside of France had come to associate with their national cinema, typified as it was internationally by the classic early exports of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir and Henri-Georges Clouzot, or the subsequent films of the "New Wave" and works by serious "auteur" filmmakers, like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.

International audiences tend to think of French cinema in these terms: small apartments, relationship dramas, black and white cinematography, poetic ruminations, loneliness, existentialism, and joyless sex. In reality, the French cinema has almost always produced mainstream comedies, low-brow farce, action films, cop movies and gory horror; films that generally made huge amounts of money at the domestic box-office but rarely travelled outside of French-speaking territories. Given an international platform through the success of his earlier work, Besson continued onwards in his attempts to create films that were accessible to the broadest of audiences, forging an image of a new French cinema that was young, dumb and full of fun; where fast cars and fast women (usually with guns) engaged in scenes of full-bodied action; and where there were enough moments of eccentricity and childlike whimsy intercut to give the impression that the films were perhaps more individualist than they really were.

In its best moments, Taxi recalls the legacy of the "cinéma du look": the brief and contentious film movement coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma issue n° 448, May 1989, which lumped together the works of directors Jean-Jacques Beineix, Leos Carax and Besson himself. The characteristics of the "cinéma du look" was an emphasis on youth and subcultures, on alienated characters in a state of rebellion against the modern world, and on the conflict between the lasting legacy of the films of the French new wave and the burgeoning influence of the new Hollywood movies produced during the 1970s and early 1980s. Films like Diva (1981), Subway and Mauvais sang (1986), while markedly different from one another in their attitudes and intentions, were seen to take recognizable Hollywood genres like mystery, film noir and science fiction, and dismantle them, populating them with bored but beautiful characters, self-reflexive allusions to popular culture and a glossy contemporary style.

We see that here in Taxi, specifically in its earlier sequences, which finds in its central character, pizza delivery driver turned taxi driver Daniel Morales, the kind of laid-back, directionless but streetwise dreamer that we might have found in films like Boy Meets Girl (1984) or Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986). That he lives out of a converted garage full of car parts and vehicles in states of repair and works out of a weird brutalist pizza restaurant on the edges of the docks, also helps evoke the further influence of Beineix and Carax, specifically The Moon in the Gutter (1983) and the aforementioned Diva and Mauvais sang.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Mauvais sang (Bad Blood) [Leos Carax, 1986]:

The Moon in the Gutter [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983]:

However, the moment the titular taxi inexplicably transforms from anonymous cab to tricked-out hotrod, effectively signals the moment both the film, and Besson's career, shift from quirky "cinéma du look" to brainless DTV action. While the film remains well-made and entertaining, it seems to signal a definite change in direction for Besson, who would never really recapture the same adoration and respect that he'd commanded as a filmmaker during the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, with later works, both as director and producer, failing with both audiences and critics.

While Taxi attempts and largely succeeds in creating a French film with a Hollywood outlook and a greater emphasis on entertainment and spectacle, it's never quite found the same creative success or cultural legacy as Besson's own action cinema that preceded it, specifically La Femme Nikita and the problematic Léon (aka, The Professional, 1994). Taxi is full of moments of great action, stunts and thrilling chase sequences, but it's also marred by Besson's deficiencies as a screenwriter. Chiefly, the film is shamelessly sexist, with female characters providing no real function to the plot beyond reinforcing the heterosexual masculinity of the central characters, or worse, being mercilessly leered over and harassed by both the protagonists and the camera itself. There's also the usual crass stereotyping and actual racism that frequently turn up in Besson's scripts, as if jokes about all people from South East Asia looking alike will somehow engender sympathy between the central characters.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Despite these various shortcomings, the film wasn't without interest. Again, it's perfectly entertaining, often amusing, with great car stunts and thrilling action sequences, and a great affinity for character, and the natural atmosphere of its south of France locations. It also features moments that point towards an even better film that might have been: specifically the earlier sequences, which are more preoccupied with the relationship between characters; the subculture of young people that converge on this strange and deeply cinematic pizza restaurant; and the feeling of vibrant, nocturnal worlds existing on the fringes of society. Ultimately however, the film is of most interest in marking and defining the evolution of Besson's career as it developed from respected cult filmmaker to entertainment entrepreneur, and how it illustrates the role of the "auteur", not as the director, but the person shaping the material from the ground-up.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Luc Besson: An Introduction? [26^th September 2019], Possible Worlds: A look at the science-fiction films of Luc Besson [20^th October 2019], The Film Director as Superstar: Or, The death of the author auteur [15^th August, 2020]